[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Waistline2 >>CB: Again to keep using this phrase becomes willful slander and misrepresention. "Too many " is always a relative term. "Too many" relative to what ? We may reach a point that there are too many people to keep warm, make food for relative to the amount of fuel by way of a fossil fuel based energy regime. The phrase "too many people" is too abstract. Too many people relative to what specifically ?
Capitalism, with its private property relations, would more like let billions die than make a drastic rationing to save people as presumably socialism would with its people before profits approach. << Reply The above capture the essence of the dispute. I actually have been painstakingly specific. The issue is not "rationing to save people" but the "social relations" - in their entirety, of bourgeois society. ^^^^^ CB: Why not both ? ^^^^^^ "Social relations" embrace all relationships between man and man and man and nature, but there has been a tendency to view the issue from the standpoint of class formation and class fragments riveted to the technology regime. Other have expanded the definition of social relations to include the shape of industrial society and the details of its market relations. In the context of asking about DMS emphasis on "social relations" versus "depletion theory" - I sided with DMS and had did so in the past, because this approach opens the door to examining what is actually produced and why. He cannot be wrong to take this approach. There is no over population crisis or one looming on the horizon. The crisis is the social relations. ^^^^^ CB: Why not both social relations and depletion ? _IF_ oil will be depleted relatively soon, then you cannot say "depletion is not an issue. Social relations is the only issue. " For one thing, whatever specific changes in the social relations that must be made will be dictated in part by what is done in order to avoid the detrimental effects of the depletion to the population. ^^^^^^^ "Too many people is not abstract in the context of the material cited in part 1, 2 and 3 of "notes." The opening line in part 1 begins: "Eating Fossil Fuel" (_http://billtotten.blogspot.com/_ <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-February/_http://b illtotten.blogspot.com/_> (http://billtotten.blogspot.com/) ) is a wonderful title. Why do we eat what we eat?" Further in part 1 it is quoted: >>US Consumption In the United States, each person consumes an average of 2,175 pounds of food per person per year. This provides the US consumer with an average daily energy intake of 3,600 Calories. The world average is 2,700 Calories per day. <33> Fully nineteen percent of the US caloric intake comes from fast food. Fast food accounts for 34% of the total food consumption for the average US citizen. The average citizen dines out for one meal out of four. <34>" Let's examine the proposition: "We may reach a point that there are too many people to keep warm, make food for relative to the amount of fuel by way of a fossil fuel based energy regime." The issue is not food relative to the amount of fossil fuel and people or the idea that we may reach some mysterious point in the future where we run out of fossil fuel in relationship to food production . . . that is the dispute. The approach deployed was to challenge the definition of food itself because bourgeois society creates a set of eatable substances necessary for its reproduction. Everyone calls this mass of eatable substances food when it is not food and does not need to be manufactured in the first place. ^^^^^^^^ CB: Humans have to have some kind of food to survive physiologically. If you purport to go forward without the forms of food that bourgeois society has created, you must devise a new form of food to meet human minimum physiologicl needs. _IF_ oil is headed to depletion, the type of new food production you devise will have to be based on a different form of energy. In doing this , you will have taken account of oil depletion ( not just social relations)and so OIL DEPLETION WILL HAVE BEEN AN ISSUE, CONTRA YOUR CLAIMS ABOVE. ^^^^^ Everything eatable is not food, but rather wrong food. This historically evolved and built up consumption pattern grows out of historical ignorance of the metabolic process. This consumption pattern that is historically built up gives the market pattern its specific shape and substance. ^^^^^^ CB: Food, as it has evolved, and to the extent it meets physiological needs is a use-value ( or foods are use-values). It is exchange-values, not use-values, that give the _market_ pattern its specific shape and substance. ^^^^^ Second, Marx was referenced in his outline of the evolution of "needs" in human society and how bourgeois property and bourgeois production inherits and creates a set of needs unique and fundamental to its self reproduction. Part 1, 2 and 3 of "Notes" have very little to do with Mark Jones writings. I beg to differ with his theoretical underpinnings on a broad number of issues, including the law of value, which provoked his initial response to some material I had written on Marx mail. Part one of "Notes" end on this the following theme and no where is Mark Jones mentioned: ^^^^^^ CB: Here I am not undertaking to defend everybody who speaks on these issues. I am talking about Mark Jones' arguments in the main. There are other Marxist ecologists. ^^^^^^ "Americans are also grand consumers of water. As of one decade ago, Americans were consuming 1,450 gallons per day per capita, with the largest amount expended on agriculture. Allowing for projected population increase, consumption by 2050 is projected at 700 gallons per day per capita, which hydrologists consider to be minimal for human needs. <36> This is without taking into consideration declining fossil fuel production. (Eating Fossil Fuel: (_http://billtotten.blogspot.com/_ <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-February/_http://b illtotten.blogspot.com/_> (http://billtotten.blogspot.com/) )." I do not believe that I slandered Mark or anyone else and cited the material and sources for which "Notes" was directed. ^^^^^ CB: Well, I pull out "slander" if someone uses an epithet like "Malthusian" , I explain why it is not Malthusian, they keep on using it without making an argument that contradicts my explanation. DMS also used terms like "reactionary", and kept flinging them, even after multiple replies to his arguments and claims. Rather than just call him some name back, I characterize his statements as "slander", statements that damage the reputation of the person about whom they are made. It might be a bit legalistic and heavy, but on the other hand I get sick of parrot talk. ^^^^^^ Here is how part 2 of "Notes" begins: >>"Scientists define "carrying capacity" as the population of a given species that can be supported indefinitely in a defined habitat without permanently damaging the ecosystem upon which it is dependent." The above definition lacks a framework of production, reproduction, the property relations, the shape of the aforementioned and the infrastructure that sustains all of this. Perhaps it is best to look at what is in front of us and what our society is experiencing and talking about in their daily living."<< ^^^^^ CB: Yes, humans have production-reproduction-property relations framework that other species don't have, but humans also are an animal species and thus can be, nay, MUST be analyzed in terms of their carrying capacity, ecosystem, habitat as well as their social relations and property relations. Because humans have culture does not mean their natural aspects are obliterated. This is fundamental materialism. As Marx and Engels explained to the "Germans" in _The German Ideology_: "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things." "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself - geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men." "Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history". But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life..." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm ^^^^ How can one speak of a crisis of sustainability without examining the universe of commodities (the social relations) and the energy tag they carry? No one ask why we drink the amount of water we drink? What drives the amount of water the individual consume as a mass, is not population growth but the metabolic process of the living organism or what is consumed and its properties. ^^^^^ CB: How is it you conclude that Mark Jones is refusing to examining the universe of commodities and the energy tag they carry ? That's exactly what he did. Biologists and physiologists _have_ measured necessary food and water consumption for human individuals. ^^^^^^^ Wrong consumption is a process that creates its own cycles of wrong consumption and gluttony. We are dealing with the metabolic process of man and the sources I quoted was Arnold Ehret, along with the book "Acid and Alkaline" and the work of Alfredo Bowman (Dr. Sebi). Wrong consumption is historically evolved and a social relations of production, although this is not how I articulate the issue as politics. As politics the issue is consuming wrong food that should not be produced in the first place. There is a gigantic infrastructure with a definable energy consequence geared to wrong production. This gigantic infrastructure of wrong production does not need to be shared in a communistic manner but abolished along with the abolition of property, whose last and final form is bourgeois property. The mass consumption of Oreo cookies is a bourgeois property relations that appears as a social relations of production and reveals the specific character of the market pattern. ^^^^^ CB: One can imagine that we will keep some of the bourgeois stuff and discard some of it. It is likely to be supercession, overcoming AND preservation, not utter obliteration of all of the bourgeois derived use-values. ^^^^^^^ How I arrived at my particular presentation of the market pattern was not on the basis of theoretical Marxism but biology and the metabolic process that is man. ^^^^ CB: Ecology is biology. "Carrying capacity" is a biological concept. The specific usage "metabolic process" is in biology, but I don't think that's the latest biological terminology here. In fact, I believe it is one of Marx's phrases, and would seem to be Marxism more than modern biology. ^^^^^^^ ^^^^^ Everyone in our society basically knows that we eat and consume wrong. Science has not been deployed to unravel our authentic metabolic process. At least 90% of everything we eat in our society is harmful to our species and the earth and this is becoming obvious to everyone in America. The issue of over consumption that is called sustainability and the carrying capacity of the earth is presented wrong because man does not exist on the earth, but rather in the earth. Mark Jones was not slandered but engaged from the standpoint of the metabolic process that is man. More later Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
